Recently, online shopping, in which sales of articles (commodities) are conducted on the Internet, has become widespread. In such online shopping, a user purchasing an article and a maker producing and selling the article conduct electronic commerce directly with each other; therefore, dealers, such as a general retail store or a special agent, cannot participate in the sales activities.
One of the systems known as having been developed in consideration of such an inconvenience is a distribution aiding system in which users garnered as customers by each dealer through sales activities are treated as members, and the dealer trades with the users by user terminals used by the members and a server installed by a maker and provided with a virtual dealer sales function.
Individual trading conditions, which each dealer determines with individual users through business negotiation activities, are registered beforehand in this distribution aiding system. Accordingly, upon receiving order-acceptance information from a user, the distribution aiding system automatically calculates a charge and a margin for the dealer according to an individual trading condition corresponding to the user, and delivers according to a predetermined individual trading condition.
By the way, individual trading conditions determined between a user and a dealer include different prices for individual commodities, etc., in accordance with a payment site condition, a delivery date condition, a traded quantity, etc., depending on a sales policy of each dealer, characters of individual customers, etc.; and if the individual trading conditions are known to a maker or rival dealers, the dealer cannot conduct independent business activities as a dealer.
However, in the conventional distribution aiding system, the individual trading conditions determined between each dealer and a user are registered in the distribution aiding server administrated by the maker; thus, there has been a problem that the individual trading conditions are known to the maker. Additionally, regarding the conventional distribution aiding system, there has been a problem that commodities other than commodities (commodity codes) registered beforehand by the maker cannot be sold.